Southwest Airlines Swot Analysis

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES The United States of America is a top destination for tourism, and according to the Readers ' Choice Awards, it is the third best country to visit. The wide variety of attractions and activities spread in the innumerous cities of this large country, created the need of an efficient transport network to facilitate travel within the US. One of the offers is the flight connections, mainly through low-cost companies. In 2016, the North American airlines industry registered a market value of $186.8 billion, as a result of the 940 million passengers carried. In such competitive industry, players must stand out with innovative strategies, paying even more attention to “the management of customers, who are not simply consumers

(“Southwest”) is an American passenger airline company that provides high-frequency, short-haul (generally under ninety-minutes) and scheduled air transportation in the US and near countries, with a fleet of 735 Boeing 737 aircrafts (the largest fleet of Boeing aircraft in the world). In the fiscal year 2016, Southwest achieved historical results, with $20,425 million on revenues, reinforcing its position as the low-cost leader in the US and globally. Apart from the low fare structure model, the company intends to focus on customer service, recording one of the best performances among the main players in the industry.

Southwest Airlines’ purpose is “to connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel”, indicating already a customer-centric vision of its service business. The key objective of this paper is to apply the service excellence principles - using the framework proposed by Francis Frei – to Southwest Airlines, in order to discover the sources of success of this company founded in 1971. Those principles are the Offering, the Funding Mechanism, the Employee Management System and the Customer Management

The company understood the tradeoffs and it knows consciously which activities should be done and the ones that should stay away. As follows, the airline focuses on short-haul, point to point routes, specialized in midsize cities and secondary airports, with very low ticket prices and limited passenger service and amenities on-board. Moreover, the high utilization of aircraft is valued, as so the high productivity of ground and gate crews in order to decrease the turnaround time.

Frequent and reliable departures and on-time arrivals are other priorities of Southwest, that operates more than 3,600 flights per day over 95 destinations. The unique boarding process of this company is also a point of difference, since it does not assign any seats to passengers. Instead, customers are assigned to one of three groups (A, B and C) and receive a number in the moment of check in. The number represents the position the passenger should occupy in the line at the gate and the boarding starts with group A. On board, travelers may sit anywhere they want, as long as the seat is still